I had good luck with Schiit from both a service and equipment standpoint. Emails responded to within an hour on a couple occasions. Fast shipping. I think the DAC is good for the pricepoint (although I have limited DAC experience).

BTW, I ordered the uber upgrade and should have it in by next weekend. Funny thing was my eyes were beginning to stray to other DACs and they offered this upgrade. It will be interesting to see what kind of lift it provides for less than $100.

Article makes it sound like most DAC chips have DSD capability, so maybe its just a firmware update??

On the hardware side consumers can expect a steady stream of DSD-capable DACs coming from a wide variety of manufacturers. Why? Because the DAC chips from almost all the major suppliers of DAC circuits have DSD capabilities built-in to the chips. For the cost of a bit of software coding any consumer or pro DAC manufacturer can include DSD support in their feature sets. Since the cost of inclusion is so low, most DAC makers will choose to add DSD support.

Palomino,Article makes it sound like most DAC chips have DSD capability

I've read that before too, however I don't know if it's as easy as a firmware update. I read on PS Audio's site that they are in the midst of adding DSD playback as a feature of their top of the line PWD, but I think they are concerned with the whole playback chain and want to do it right ... so it is taking some time, and even then they are requiring the PWD to be sent back to them in order to implement the changes.

So I think its more a possibility that if the chips do have the capability then the manufacturers of the DACs need to do some tweaking that can't readily be done through software alone ... however I'm just speculating at this point.

I do not have the USB option. Reaction to that over on head-fi has not been as good as the reaction to the output board. Some saying its a bit thin sounding.

Does it sound good to you? I find it hard to believe that Schiit would put out a bad sounding board.

Also, forum member AiDee does great DAC reviews. He was also the member who alerted us to the upgrade. He did the uber upgrade and I hope he has time to do a review/comparison for the Bifrost uber. He has 3-4 sub $1,000 DACs to compare it to.

Ah yes, AiDee. Thanks AiDee. I see his name over on head-fi too. I signed up as buddha22 over there just to tell people how I got my stupid LEDs back into their holes on reassembly.

The usb board looks identical to the one I took out, except, there's now a jumper wire soldered across two (very tiny) pins of the main chip that's surface mounted to the board. (how a human can solder so carefully is beyond me). And there's one tiny Cap that's a different size, unsure if different value.

I didn't compare individually. I put both in at the same time. The net difference is clearer mids and highs. more detail.

Personally, I think the USB card is just for adding the handling of a different format/bit rate. It's all in the digital domain before the DAC and before the analog output amp (where I think all the sound improvement came from). I wouldn't guess the usb card has anything to do with the sound change. but I didn't try to isolate that. For not much $, I'm happy with a better "bang for the buck" dac.